The Mystery Housemates

Late Summer, 1972.  It was a quiet Sunday afternoon on Eagle Street. Mom was watching her favorite old black and white Tarzan movies on TV.  The little kids were outside.  I was sitting on the living room floor, playing with new two new Poodle puppies mom had purchased in March.

Then big brother Skippy showed up on the porch.  Skippy was 23 years old.  And ever since I could remember, he was in and out of trouble.  In between stints in juvenile hall, county jail, and county mental hospitals, he had brief periods of freedom, and proved time and time again that he could not be trusted when he was out of custody.  Whenever he showed up, we would have to immediately hide our purses and our piggy banks, because he would steal anything he could get his hands on.  He even stole little Jeffrey's framed first earned dollar bill that was hanging on the hallway wall.  So when he opened the screen door on that boring Sunday,  I immediately got up to hide my stuff.

Skippy wasn't alone on this day.  Trailing behind him were two young men.  One was tall and lanky, with black hair and black eyes, and the other was a little shorter, with blond hair and green eyes.  They didn't look like Skippy's usual running mates.  Most of the time, Skippy brought home the grungiest long-haired hippies and the skankiest prostitutes.  All his friends were drug addicts.  Most reeked of marijuana, others had the sweaty, pasty-faced, runny nosed look of a heroin junkie.  These two guys, however, were clean, with short haircuts, no facial hair, were dressed neatly and were carrying dark green duffel bags.  There was something really wrong with this picture.

Skippy introduced the two guys to Mom.  He didn't give their names.  He just said that he met them downtown by the Greyhound bus station and they were hungry so he brought them over for a meal.  The guys looked younger than Skippy. They were really polite and soft spoken.  They seemed nice, so Mom sent me up to Washington street to get a bucket of chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken.  She knew better than to send Skippy, because he would take the money and go buy drugs with it.

When I got back, Skippy was gone.  He had bummed enough money from Mom to go buy some Camel cigarettes, and he left the two guys at our house.  Mom served up chicken to the guys, the kids, and me.  It was now starting to get dark, and Skippy never returned.  The two guys started looking uncomfortable.  Conversation stopped and things became awkward.  One of them said that they didn't have a place to stay for the night and asked if they could stay until morning.  Mom said it would be okay.  She had me take them down to the scary basement to get them something to sleep on.  There were two really old WW II era army cots and a couple of horrible scratchy wool military blankets down there that they were to sleep on that night.  She put them up in Jeff's room and we all went to bed in unlocked rooms, trusting that these strangers were not really ax murderers on the lam.

The type of army cots we used for guest stays

The next day, when we kids showed up in the kitchen for bowls of cereal, Mom was already there, talking to the two guys.  They seemed more comfortable.  Mom told us that they were going to stay on with us for awhile.  They still seemed afraid to tell us their names, so I named them after my two favorite characters from the TV show "Emergency!"

Roy and Johnny, TV characters from "Emergency!"

We now had two housemates.  Their new names were Johnny and Roy.  They were really nice guys.  We kids adopted them as our big brothers.  These big brothers were different from our real ones, however.  They didn't scare us, hit us, molest us, or steal from us. There was no drug induced rages, drunken demands for money, or cops showing up at the house. They helped with the chores, took out the trash every week, helped clean up after the dogs, and mom even bribed them to clean my horridly messy room by providing them bottles of Boones Farm Strawberry Hill and Apple Wine.  They seemed to have more fun cleaning up huge messes when they were a little tipsy on cheap wine.

They shared in little sister's 6th birthday:

        Jeff, Johnny, Tabatha, Roy, and Tammy celebrate Tabatha's 6th Birthday, November  1972


They went to my Christmas piano recital in December:

Johnny, Jeff, Tabatha, Tammy, and Roy.  We kids are not smiling because we were going to perform in a Christmas recital that night and none of us were thrilled about it.


Our mystery housemates stayed with us for nearly a year.  I can't really recall the exact length of time, but I remember that they celebrated Christmas with us and were still at our house when the weather started getting warm in the Spring.   During that time, Mom found out their real names and that they had gone AWOL from their military service.   Roy, who was really Mike, was in the Marines and Johnny, who was really James, was in the Navy.  They had been growing increasingly restless, knowing that they couldn't hide forever and they were afraid to face the consequences of their actions of the year before.  One Sunday morning, Mom said she had talked them into going back to where they came from and that we were going to take them somewhere after we had our breakfast. In the living room, the guys were busy packing up their stuff in the duffel bags.  We kids loved them very much by this time and didn't want them to go, but the time had come.

We all got in the blue Volvo and Mom drove to a freeway onramp and pulled over. Johnny and Roy got out of the car with their bags, waved to us, and stuck their thumbs up to hitch a ride back to somewhere.  My young siblings cried as Mom drove away.  After driving a few blocks, Mom turned back and returned to the onramp to see if they were still there, but they were already gone.

And what about Skippy? When he left for those Camel cigarettes, he never returned.   By the time Johnny and Roy left Eagle Street, Skippy was in Susanville Prison, setting Mom up for her future big disaster.

Advice not taken

In 1973, Mom became smitten with her penpal Paris Young.  This long distance romance had swept her off her feet.  She must have had doubts about the road she was driving herself and her children down, because she never told her friends or her sister that her boyfriend was a prisoner.  But she still spent lots of time seeking signs that her decisions were sound.  She consulted the Ouija board.

Usually it would be late at night, after the little kids were in bed.  Most likely it was after the mailman failed to deliver a letter from Paris, and Mom was starving for more flowery romantic promises, or a scheduled Sunday phone call that for some reason didn't happen.  Those trying times called for a consultation with the Ouija board.

Mom would get it set up on a card table, then summon me out of whatever dog book I was reading.  We would put our fingers lightly on the pointer, and then she would talk to Daddy, trying to summon his spirit:

"Darling, are you here?"  Then her hands would push the pointer towards "Yes."
"Does Paris love me?"  Again, her hands would push the pointer towards "Yes."

I would break her concentration:
"Mom, you pushed it.  I thought the spirits were supposed to move it, not us."

She corrected my perception of what she was doing:
"I am not pushing it, Daddy is doing it.  It just feels like I am moving it."

Then she would go back to talking to the Ouiji board:

"Darling, does Paris want to marry me?"  The pointer moved quickly over to "Yes."
"And is he going to be your children's new father?"  No suspense here, "Yes" again.

Mom was very pleased with the answers she was getting.

"Is Paris getting out soon?"  A bit of hesitation, then the pointer went to "Yes."
"And we will live happily ever after, right Darling?"  A resounding move towards "Yes."

This little scene would be repeated dozens of times over the two years of her engagement to the conman.

She also consulted her personal psychic and faith healer, Cecil Cawthorne (see Sept 16 2017 article, What's with this Spiritualist Stuff?") I had not seen Cecil for many months, because he had moved out of San Diego.  I don't think she told him of her boyfriend's circumstances, but she was planning her upcoming marriage and wanted Cecil Cawthorne to officiate at the wedding.  When the marriage finally took place in July of 1975, however, Cecil was not the minister.  Mom never talked about the reasons, and I never asked.  When Mom passed away in 1986, I found a letter, folded and forgotten, in the back of her desk drawer:

Mom obviously was very unhappy with Cecil's response and she never spoke of him again.  In his letter, he begged her to slow down.  His advice was to live together for 6 months before making everything official.   In the end she rejected Cecil's prophetic warning, preferring instead to stay in the fantasyland of an Ouija pointer which she ensured would provide the answers she wished to hear.  And consequently, Paris wiped her out financially, mentally, and ultimately, physically, in less than 5 months.  The Reverend Cecil Cawthorne may or may not have been psychic, but in this sad chapter of our time on Eagle Street, he was most certainly right.